Thresholds
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: She couldn't open every door or grant every wish...but she didn't need to either.


**A/N:** Written for the Rlt Greenroom challenge 4: write a crossover. And this isn't quite what I intended, but after the first few lines I decided it was better than the original picture. :) You may want to look up a brief summary of Digimon Frontier if you're not familiar with it, otherwise this might be a bit hard to understand. I think you can do without prior knowledge of xxxHolic.

Enjoy.

* * *

**Thresholds**

* * *

There are many worlds beyond a person's reach, worlds that exist beyond their wildest imaginations breaking every rule and law known to man. There were also many worlds one could reach, if only they stretched out their hand and opened their mind.

There were also worlds that one knew, or rather knew _of_, but existed far beyond their reach. Fortune-tellers – the true ones, not those who made a living sprouting sentences from astrology books – were some of these people, seeing the strands of many futures, most of which never came to be. Even the people whose fortunes they told sometimes fell in

to this category, people who had been informed of a certain future that, under their own tutelage, drifted off to a different path.

But there was one woman who was far more intricately involved in the connections between worlds: the Dimensional Witch.

* * *

Some wondered if different worlds were connected by the vast expanse of space. Some even wondered if those stars - and the wide reflective surface of the moon - were in fact doorways into these different worlds. Maybe that was the driving force of space-research: attempting to identify, understand and open these doors.

It wasn't something restricted to those worlds that held humans, but rather all creatures with the ability of free thought wondered as to the limits of the Cosmos, and how far within that they could reach. There were, as such, many worlds wherein their inhabitants explored routes through and around space without the input of humanity.

Sometimes though, that divider was more difficult to identify. Like in the world of Digimon, where Digimon had evolved from the data that humans had created and then let loose. Who could, then, tell the difference between what humans had passed on and what was independent of humans? Some pondered quite heavily on that; others put little thought towards it at all.

But even those Digimon, Digimon like Duskmon, found themselves looking to the stars and the moons in the night sky and wondering if there were other, happier, worlds out there.

* * *

Yuuko was a resourceful woman, but even she had to admit there were some things simply beyond her. As the Dimensional Witch, there were worlds she could not access: worlds she knew existed but could not find a shred of concrete evidence to support the fact. Then there were worlds which she could see into, as though looking through a window, but could not cross the threshold of.

Some of those worlds were the world of Digimon, of data cast aside by man that had somehow gained independence. A body and a mind, she would say should she be asked - but it was a world few who came to her knew of, because of the nature of that world.

In fact, the only time she met people who did know of that world was when she was outside her shop, taking a few detours to her destination in order to form new connections in an ever growing web of life. And they were people who would probably never see her shop because they would never have a need for it.

* * *

Only those who had a need for her services could cross that particular threshold between worlds: between the world of the customer and that within which her shop resided. A shop that granted wishes: wishes that were within her power to grant, both as a woman who had garnered lifetimes of wisdom and magic, and one who was called the Dimensional Witch.

And like there were dimensions she could not travel to, there were wishes she could not grant. Often, they coincided: the world of the dead for example was beyond her reach so she could not send one there nor call one back from that realm. It was only the dead who could transverse that realm, to keep it distinct from the living.

Those worlds of Digimon were a different sort of example, of worlds she could see but not touch. Because only children could enter that world: children who were pure at heart and could survive the trials of reality without succumbing to it. Children who had wishes buried within their hearts but were too young to face the upfront price she charged. Children, who could help that world in exchange for being helped.

And she sometimes watched them, watched as those children had their wishes fulfilled and never came to her, because she would not enjoy the price she would require otherwise.

She had no more need of that world than it did of her, and her access was denied in the interest of keeping that ever-delicate balance of the world.

* * *

Duskmon was a Digimon, after a fashion. First and foremost he was an empty slate, fashioned and polished by Cherubimon's hand and then released into the castle of a wider world. A world that spread out with dry cracked ground below and an ever-dark sky above, lit only by the swirl of small purple stars above the Rose Morning Star, and the three faded moons in the sky.

Above that slate, he was the Warrior of Darkness: Duskmon. Or so it had been written, and so he had accepted. And it was debatable whether the Legendary Warriros were Digimon at all: born from spirits, almost Gods, that had slumbered in the ground for millennia before either finding new hosts or forming new corporeal bodies for themselves...after a fashion, bred from the data that was the essence of all Digimon.

But they weren't _all_ Digimon – they were far too...human for that. Like Mercurimon's Shakespearean accent, and Ranamon's Southern drawl, even if they were unlike those other Warriors, who inhabited the bodies of human children. Even if their corporeal bodies were made independent of humankind.

As for him...Cherubimon told him, time and time again, that pain and loneliness were concepts created by humanity and foreign to the Digimon World. And yet he could not help but feel those echoes, could not help but know the label instinctively - even though his earliest memories stretched to waking as he now lived: as a Digimon.

He found himself drawn to the moon, even if nothing in the land drove him. Often, he felt a prick of...something, when he watched the five humans endowed with the Warrior Spirits, but it was a fleeting feeling, quickly swallowed by the darkness that was innate.

But when he watched the moon, even the darkness could not devour it whole, could not sink it into the sea of apathy within which pain and loneliness and all those human-like feelings became nothing more than echoes in an almost silent breeze.

And he wondered what was beyond that moon's reflecting face, what was beyond his reach...or maybe just beyond his mind. Those little things that nagged him seemed ten-fold in the face of that moon: the tendrils that poked as he watched those children come closer and closer, those echoes that pricked his hard-cased skin...

* * *

Yuuko removed the pipe from her mouth, watching the… She wasn't quite sure _what_ to call him. He was human, but at the same time he was not. Unlike him, she could see the human child that had gone into his making, a dim outline in a far greater and more corporeal shadow. She could also see that presence became stronger at every poke and prod that made the being so very uncomfortable. The very thing that led him to stare out at the moon as though it held the answers he sought.

She also knew there were no answers to find there, for he had done the same thing when he had been human, or undeniably so. In his own world, a world far closer to her touch, like many other worlds inhabited so heavily by the human race. Not exclusively of course – and her dear assistant should know that well by now – but certainly humans had a heavy hand in the shape of the world within which they resided.

Sometimes, it was interesting to watch the worlds in which she had no influence, in which there were others to take on her roles as the Wish-Granter and as the Dimensional Witch. Certainly those forces were not as powerful as her – but she had underestimated them, because she had not thought them capable of rescuing a boy on the brink of death and recreating his lost spirit into a solid form.

And thus she continued watching, watching as the boy who'd lost himself near-death became a blank slate, then a vassal for a spirit he was not capable of comprehending. And so he wondered lost still, without memory or purpose or even a direction to choose…

But she could see the strings of fate that bound him to those children he often watched – or to one of those children in particular. And she could see them becoming ever smaller, as those forces neared…

Yes, she thought as she puffed out a little more smoke. Those two would be meeting soon, and then things would appear on that blank slate and a good many wishes would be fulfilled. The boy who was now Duskmon would find the thing he had lost, and an opportunity to fulfil the wish that had led him to lose it. He may even get another chance at the life that had almost slipped away from him. The other child would also find something he'd been searching unconsciously for…as would a third, who did not even realise just who fate had led him to see and remember. And those angels would have their wishes as well: one for life; another for death.

Perhaps, in the end, there was only one in that world who would not see their wish fulfilled.

* * *

Wishes were such strange things. A being with the ability to freely think was also capable of wishing for anything they felt was their desire, even if it ultimately cost them something irreplaceable – or resulted in something being taken away from someone else. After all, no thing in the world was able to stand on its own; the strings that bound one thing to another were so many and so sporadically cast that it was inevitable somebody or someone else would become involved along the way.

Even the thresholds that separated one world from the next were not enough to stop this from spilling across words, and the bonds between the Digimon worlds and their human counterparts were a prime example. After all, the problems that had led to a pair of brothers fighting each other as Digimon had in fact originated in the human world, and by human hands. And yet, after a fashion, the wishes of all involved in that could be granted…and indeed, those two now stood upon a road leading to that end.

While it was true that one wish could not bring happiness to every being in existence, there were instances where the end result was good enough. And just as she could not open a door to every _world_ that existed, what she could do was more than enough for her needs, for what purpose would she serve in a world that ultimately had no need for someone like her…or she for it?


End file.
